Russia wants to regain its pride by raising Kursk nuclear submarine from Arctic

MOSCOW (AP)  Almost a year after it sank in the Arctic, killing
all its 118 crewmen and dealing a sharp blow to Russias prestige,
the Kursk nuclear submarine is again in the global spotlight as a
costly and daring effort to raise it to the surface gets under
way.

Russian officials say one goal of the salvage operation is to
recover the Kursks two nuclear reactors, which havent leaked
radiation so far but remain a potential threat. Another, unspoken
motive is to demonstrate the governments strength, resolve and
openness  all absent in the days following the catastrophe.

One of our main problems in the last few years has been the
lack of trust in the leadership, President Vladimir Putin told a
news conference Wednesday. This trust can be restored only if we
fulfill our promises.

After communications with the Kursk were lost during naval
maneuvers on Aug. 12, 2000, the bewildered Navy command waited
hours before launching a search, wasting precious time to save
survivors trapped in the subs rear compartments.

The government refused offers of Western help and Russian
mini-submarines spent several days in futile attempts to hook onto
the submarines escape hatch until Moscow finally invited foreign
divers  who took just a few hours to open it.

Putin remained at the balmy seaside resort of Sochi throughout
the crisis. Only after harsh media criticism of his absence did
Putin fly to the Kursks home base to meet with the submariners
relatives. He promised to raise the submarine to recover all the
bodies.

The recovery effort, which began this week and is estimated to
cost about $70 million, is unprecedented in naval history. Some
submarines have been raised before, but none has been comparable to
the giant Kursk.

No one has ever tried to recover an 18,000-ton submarine
before, its a huge task, said Capt. Richard Sharpe, the former
editor of Janes Fighting Ships, a widely recognized reference on
the worlds navies.

Five other nuclear submarines sank before the Kursk  two of
them American and the three others Russian. All remain buried at
depths of up to 16,000 feet because of the enormous costs involved
in efforts to lift them. In contrast, the Kursk sank to just 357
feet.

Sharpe said the Russian Navy needs to raise the Kursk because
its location in shallow waters in the middle of the Russian
Northern Fleet exercise area makes it a potential collision
hazard.

The last thing the Russian fleet needs is for another submarine
to crash into it, said Sharpe, a former British nuclear submarine
commander. For that reason alone, its got to be moved.

Russian Navy officials also say raising the Kursk could help
shed light on the cause of the accident. Russian officials said the
disaster was triggered by a practice torpedo, but they do not know
if it was caused by an internal malfunction in the torpedo  the
theory favored by most outside experts  or a collision.

Sharpe said the tightly sealed Kursks reactors pose no real
danger to the salvage effort. They shut down automatically when the
vessel sank, and regular monitoring has shown no radiation
leak.

The dangers are much more the physical ones, of trying to
maneuver the 18,000-ton weight of sunken submarine up way to the
surface, he said.

The project, led by the Dutch firm Mammoet, envisages raising
the Kursk using cables connected to 26 hydraulic jacks anchored to
a giant barge. Mammoet says its technology allows precise control
of every inch of lifting.

One previous submarine rescue operation, mounted in 1974 by
Washington and involving the CIA and industrialist Howard Hughes,
attempted to raise a Russian diesel sub that sank 750 miles
northwest of Hawaii in 1968. The CIA later confirmed that the
submarine split in two and that half of it slipped away as it was
pulled to about 5,000 feet with a giant claw from the Glomar
Explorer rescue ship.

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Some of the Kursks torpedoes are believed to remain unexploded
in the subs weapons bay. To avoid the danger of their detonation,
the Kursks first compartment is to be cut off and left at the
bottom of the Barents Sea. Navy officials say they will consider
lifting it separately next year.

As the recovery started this week, engineers used an unmanned,
remote-controlled vessel to measure radiation levels and dig out
the buried first compartment. After the bow is cut off around Aug.
8, Russian and foreign divers will drill holes in the hull and
attach steel cables for lifting the sub. That operation is
tentatively set for Sept. 15 and is expected to last about eight
hours.

Compared to the bungled rescue effort, when the Navy released
contradictory and often false information and kept journalists away
from the scene, the current operation is a show of transparency,
with the Kremlin organizing excursions to the site and real-time
reports on the effort on a new Web page.

By raising the submarine under close media scrutiny, the
government is taking a bitter pill against the Soviet syndrome of
lying, said Alexander Pikayev, an analyst with the Carnegie
Endowment.